بریدی

BRADY

“My boy is a genius,” Deborah Hartsfield used to tell her friends. To which she would add, with a winning smile: “It’s not bragging if it’s the truth.”

This was before she started drinking heavily, when she still had friends. Once she’d had another son, Frankie, but Frankie was no genius. Frankie was brain-damaged. One evening when he was four years old, he fell down the cellar stairs and died of a broken neck. That was the story Deborah and Brady told, anyway. The truth was a little different. A little more complex.

Brady loved to invent things, and one day he’d invent something that would make the two of them rich, would put them on that famous street called Easy. Deborah was sure of it, and told him so often. Brady believed it.

He managed just Bs and Cs in most of his courses, but in Computer Science I and II he was a straight-A star. By the time he graduated from North Side High, the Hartsfield house was equipped with all sorts of gadgets, some of them—like the blue boxes by which Brady stole cable TV from Midwest Vision—highly illegal. He had a workroom in the basement where Deborah rarely ventured, and it was there that he did his inventing.

Little by little, doubt crept in. And resentment, doubt’s fraternal twin. No matter how inspired his creations were, none were moneymakers. There were guys in California—Steve Jobs, for instance—who made incredible fortunes and changed the world just tinkering in their garages, but the things Brady came up with never quite made the grade.

His design for the Rolla, for instance. It was to be a computer-­powered vacuum cleaner that would run by itself, turning on gimbals and starting in a new direction each time it met an obstacle. That looked like a sure winner until Brady spotted a Roomba vacuum cleaner in a fancy-shmancy appliance store on Lacemaker Lane. Someone had beaten him to the punch. The phrase a day late and a dollar short occurred to him. He pushed it away, but sometimes at night when he couldn’t sleep, or when he was coming down with one of his migraines, it recurred.

Yet two of his inventions—and minor ones at that—made the slaughter at City Center possible. They were modified TV remotes he called Thing One and Thing Two. Thing One could change traffic signals from red to green, or vice-versa. Thing Two was more sophisticated. It could capture and store signals sent from automobile key fobs, allowing Brady to unlock those vehicles after their clueless owners had departed. At first he used Thing Two as a burglary tool, opening cars and tossing them for cash or other valuables. Then, as the idea of driving a big car into a crowd of people took vague shape in his mind (along with fantasies of assassinating the President or maybe a hot shit movie star), he used Thing Two on Mrs. Olivia Trelawney’s Mercedes, and discovered she kept a spare key in her glove compartment.

That car he left alone, filing the existence of the spare key away for later use. Not long after, like a message from the dark powers that ran the universe, he read in the newspaper that a job fair was to be held at City Center on the tenth of April.

Thousands were expected to show up.

• • •

After he started working the Cyber Patrol at Discount Electronix and could buy crunchers on the cheap, Brady wired together seven off-brand laptops in his basement workroom. He rarely used more than one of them, but he liked the way they made the room look: like something out of a science fiction movie or a Star Trek episode. He wired in a voice-activated system, too, and this was years before Apple made a voice-ac program named Siri a star.

Once again, a day late and a dollar short.

Or, in this case, a few billion.

Being in a situation like that, who wouldn’t want to kill a bunch of people?

He only got eight at City Center (not counting the wounded, some of them maimed really good), but could have gotten thousands at that rock concert. He’d have been remembered forever. But before he could push the button that would have sent ball bearings flying in a jet-propelled, ever-widening deathfan, mutilating and decapitating hundreds of screaming prepubescent girls (not to mention their overweight and overindulgent mommies), someone had turned out all his lights.

That part of his memory was blacked out permanently, it seemed, but he didn’t have to remember. There was only one person it could have been: Kermit William Hodges. Hodges was supposed to commit suicide like Mrs. Trelawney, that was the plan, but he’d somehow avoided both that and the explosives Brady had stashed in Hodges’s car. The old retired detective showed up at the concert and thwarted him mere seconds before Brady could achieve his immortality.

Boom, boom, out go the lights.

Angel, angel, down we go.

• • •

Coincidence is a tricksy bitch, and it so happened that Brady was transported to Kiner Memorial by Unit 23 out of Firehouse 3. Rob Martin wasn’t on the scene—he was at that time touring Afghanistan, all expenses paid by the United States ­government—but Jason Rapsis was the paramedic onboard, trying to keep Brady alive as 23 raced toward the hospital. If offered a bet on his chances, Rapsis would have bet against. The young man was seizing violently. His heart rate was 175, his blood pressure alternately spiking and falling. Yet he was still in the land of the living when 23 reached Kiner.

There he was examined by Dr. Emory Winston, an old hand in the patch-em-up, fix-em-up wing of the hospital some vets called the Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club. Winston collared a med student who happened to be hanging around the ER and chatting up nurses. Winston invited him to do a quick-and-dirty evaluation of the new patient. The student reported depressed reflexes, a dilated and fixed left pupil, and a positive right Babinski.

“Meaning?” Winston asked.

“Meaning this guy is suffering an irreparable brain injury,” said the student. “He’s a gork.”

“Very good, we may make a doctor of you yet. Prognosis?”

“Dead by morning,” said the student.

“You’re probably right,” Winston said. “I hope so, because he’s never coming back from this. We’ll give him a CAT scan, though.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s protocol, son. And because I’m curious to see how much damage there actually is while he’s still alive.”

He was still alive seven hours later, when Dr. Annu Singh, ably assisted by Dr. Felix Babineau, performed a craniotomy to evacuate the massive blood clot that was pressing on Brady’s brain and increasing the damage minute by minute, strangling divinely specialized cells in their millions. When the operation was finished, Babineau turned to Singh and offered him a hand that was still encased in a blood-stippled glove.

“That,” he said, “was amazing.”

Singh shook Babineau’s hand, but he did so with a deprecating smile. “That was routine,” he said. “Done a thousand of them. Well . . . a couple of hundred. What’s amazing is this patient’s constitution. I can’t believe he lived through the operation. The damage to his poor old chump . . .” Singh shook his head. “Iy-yi-yi.”

“You know what he was trying to do, I take it?”

“Yes, I was informed. Terrorism on a grand scale. He may live for awhile, but he will never be tried for his crime, and he will be no great loss to the world when he goes.”

It was with this thought in mind that Dr. Babineau began slipping Brady—not quite brain-dead, but almost—an experimental drug which he called Cerebellin (although only in his mind; technically, it was just a six-digit number), this in addition to the established protocols of increased oxygenation, diuretics, antiseizure drugs, and steroids. Experimental drug 649558 had shown promising results when tested on animals, but thanks to a tangle of regulatory bureaucracies, human trials were years away. It had been developed in a Bolivian neuro lab, which added to the hassle. By the time human testing commenced (if it ever did), Babineau would be living in a Florida gated community, if his wife had her way. And bored to tears.

This was an opportunity to see results while he was still actively involved in neurological research. If he got some, it was not impossible to imagine a Nobel Prize for Medicine somewhere down the line. And there was no downside as long as he kept the results to himself until human trials were okayed. The man was a murderous degenerate who was never going to wake up, anyway. If by some miracle he did, his consciousness would at best be of the shadowy sort experienced by patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Yet even that would be an amazing result.

You may be helping someone farther down the line, Mr. Hartsfield, he told his comatose patient. Doing a spoonful of good instead of a shovelful of evil. And if you should suffer an adverse reaction? Perhaps go entirely flatline (not that you have far to go), or even die, rather than showing a bit of increased brain function?

No great loss. Not to you, and certainly not to your family, because you have none.

Nor to the world; the world would be delighted to see you go.

He opened a file on his computer titled HARTSFIELD CEREBELLIN TRIALS. There were nine of these trials in all, spread over a fourteen-month period in 2010 and 2011. Babineau saw no change. He might as well have been giving his human guinea pig distilled water.

He gave up.

• • •

The human guinea pig in question spent fifteen months in the dark, an inchoate spirit who at some point in the sixteenth month remembered his name. He was Brady Wilson Hartsfield. There was nothing else at first. No past, no present, no him beyond the six syllables of his name. Then, not long before he would have given up and just floated away, another word came. The word was control. It had once meant something important, but he could not think what.

In his hospital room, lying in bed, his glycerin-moistened lips moved and he spoke the word aloud. He was alone; this was still three weeks before a nurse would observe Brady open his eyes and ask for his mother.

“Con . . . trol.”

And the lights came on. Just as they did in his Star Trek–style computer workroom when he voice-activated them from the top of the stairs leading down from the kitchen.

That’s where he was: in his basement on Elm Street, looking just as it had on the day he’d left it for the last time. There was another word that woke up another function, and now that he was here, he remembered that, as well. Because it was a good word.

“Chaos!”

In his mind, he boomed it out like Moses on Mount Sinai. In his hospital bed, it was a whispered croak. But it did the job, because his row of laptop computers came to life. On each screen was the number 20 . . . then 19 . . . then 18 . . .

What is this? What, in the name of God?

For a panicky moment he couldn’t remember. All he knew was that if the countdown he saw marching across the seven screens reached zero, the computers would freeze. He would lose them, this room, and the little sliver of consciousness he had somehow managed. He would be buried alive in the darkness of his own hea—

And that was the word! The very one!

“Darkness!”

He screamed it at the top of his lungs—at least inside. Outside it was that same whispered croak from long unused vocal cords. His pulse, respiration, and blood pressure had all begun to rise. Soon Head Nurse Becky Helmington would notice and come to check on him, hurrying but not quite running.

In Brady’s basement workroom, the countdown on the computers stopped at 14, and on each screen a picture appeared. Once upon a time, those computers (now stored in a cavernous police evidence room and labeled exhibits A through G) had booted up showing stills from a movie called The Wild Bunch. Now, however, they showed photographs from Brady’s life.

On screen 1 was his brother Frankie, who choked on an apple, suffered his own brain damage, and later fell down the cellar stairs (helped along by his big brother’s foot).

On screen 2 was Deborah herself. She was dressed in a clingy white robe that Brady remembered instantly. She called me her honeyboy, he thought, and when she kissed me her lips were always a little damp and I got a hard-on. When I was little, she called that a stiffy. Sometimes when I was in the tub she’d rub it with a warm wet washcloth and ask me if it felt good.

On screen 3 were Thing One and Thing Two, inventions that had actually worked.

On screen 4 was Mrs. Trelawney’s gray Mercedes sedan, the hood dented and the grille dripping with blood.

On screen 5 was a wheelchair. For a moment the relevance wouldn’t come, but then it clicked in. It was how he had gotten into the Mingo Auditorium on the night of the ’Round Here concert. Nobody worried about a poor old cripple in a wheelchair.

On screen 6 was a handsome, smiling young man. Brady couldn’t recall his name, at least not yet, but he knew who the young man was: the old Det.-Ret.’s nigger lawnboy.

And on screen 7 was Hodges himself, wearing a fedora cocked rakishly over one eye and smiling. Gotcha, Brady, that smile said. Whapped you with my whapper and there you lie, in a hospital bed, and when will you rise from it and walk? I’m betting never.

Fucking Hodges, who spoiled everything.

• • •

Those seven images were the armature around which Brady began to rebuild his identity. As he did so, the walls of his basement room—always his hideaway, his redoubt against a stupid and uncaring world—began to thin. He heard other voices coming through the walls and realized that some were nurses, some were doctors, and some—perhaps—were law enforcement types, checking up on him to make sure he wasn’t faking. He both was and wasn’t. The truth, like that concerning Frankie’s death, was complex.

At first he opened his eyes only when he was sure he was alone, and didn’t open them often. There wasn’t a lot in his room to look at. Sooner or later he would have to come awake all the way, but even when he did they must not know that he could think much, when in fact he was thinking more clearly every day. If they knew that, they would put him on trial.

Brady didn’t want to be put on trial.

Not when he still might have things to do.

• • •

A week before Brady spoke to Nurse Norma Wilmer, he opened his eyes in the middle of the night and looked at the bottle of saline suspended from the IV stand beside his bed. Bored, he lifted his hand to push it, perhaps even knock it to the floor. He did not succeed in doing that, but it was swinging back and forth from its hook before he realized both of his hands were still lying on the counterpane, the fingers turned in slightly due to the muscle atrophy physical therapy could slow but not stop—not, at least, when the patient was sleeping the long sleep of low brainwaves.

Did I do that?

He reached out again, and his hands still did not move much (although the left, his dominant hand, trembled a bit), but he felt his palm touch the saline bottle and put it back in motion.

He thought, That’s interesting, and fell asleep. It was the first honest sleep he’d had since Hodges (or perhaps it had been his nigger lawnboy) put him in this goddam hospital bed.

• • •

On the following nights—late nights, when he could be sure no one might come in and see—Brady experimented with his phantom hand. Often as he did so he thought of a high school classmate named Henry “Hook” Crosby, who had lost his right hand in a car accident. He had a prosthetic—obviously fake, so he wore it with a glove—but sometimes he wore a stainless steel hook to school, instead. Henry claimed it was easier to pick things up with the hook, and as a bonus, it grossed out girls when he snuck up behind them and caressed a calf or bare arm with it. He once told Brady that, although he’d lost the hand seven years ago, he sometimes felt it itching, or prickling, as if it had gone numb and was just waking up. He showed Brady his stump, smooth and pink. “When it gets prickly like that, I’d swear I could scratch my head with it,” he said.

Brady now knew exactly how Hook Crosby felt . . . except he, Brady, could scratch his head with his phantom hand. He had tried it. He had also discovered that he could rattle the slats in the venetian blinds the nurses dropped over his window at night. That window was much too far away from his bed to reach, but with the phantom hand he could reach it, anyway. Someone had put a vase of fake flowers on the table next to his bed (he later discovered it was Head Nurse Becky Helmington, the only one on staff to treat him with a degree of kindness), and he could slide it back and forth, easy as pie.

After a struggle—his memory was full of holes—he recalled the name for this sort of phenomenon: telekinesis. The ability to move objects by concentrating on them. Only any real concentration made his head ache fiercely, and his mind didn’t seem to have much to do with it. It was his hand, his dominant left hand, even though the one lying splay-fingered on the bedspread never moved.

Pretty amazing. He was sure that Babineau, the doctor who came to see him most frequently (or had; lately he seemed to be losing interest), would be over the moon with excitement, but this was one talent Brady intended to keep to himself.

It might come in handy at some point, but he doubted it. Wiggling one’s ears was also a talent, but not one that had any useful value. Yes, he could move the bottles on the IV stand, and rattle the blinds, and knock over a picture; he could send ripples through his blankets, as though a big fish were swimming beneath. Sometimes he did one of those things when a nurse was in the room, because their startled reactions were amusing. That, however, seemed to be the extent of this new ability. He had tried and failed to turn on the television suspended over his bed, had tried and failed to close the door to the en suite bathroom. He could grasp the chrome handle—he felt its cold hardness as his fingers closed around it—but the door was too heavy and his phantom hand was too weak. At least, so far. He had an idea that if he continued to exercise it, the hand might grow stronger.

I need to wake up, he thought, if only so I can get some aspirin for this endless fucking headache and actually eat some real food. Even a dish of hospital custard would be a treat. I’ll do it soon. Maybe even tomorrow.

But he didn’t. Because on the following day, he discovered that telekinesis wasn’t the only new ability he’d brought back from wherever he’d been.

• • •

The nurse who came in most afternoons to check his vitals and most evenings to get him ready for the night (you couldn’t say ready for bed when he was always in bed) was a young woman named Sadie MacDonald. She was dark-haired and pretty in a washed-out, no-makeup sort of way. Brady had observed her through half-closed eyes, as he observed all visitors to his room in the days since he had come through the wall from his basement workroom where he had first regained consciousness.

She seemed frightened of him, but he came to realize that didn’t exactly make him special, because Nurse MacDonald was frightened of everyone. She was the kind of woman who scuttles rather than walks. If someone came into 217 while she was about her duties—Head Nurse Becky Helmington, for instance—Sadie had a tendency to shrink into the background. And she was terrified of Dr. Babineau. When she had to be in the room with him, Brady could almost taste her fear.

He came to realize that might not have been an exaggeration.

• • •

On the day after Brady fell asleep thinking of custard, Sadie MacDonald came into Room 217 at quarter past three, checked the monitor above the head of his bed, and wrote some numbers on the clipboard that hung at the foot. Next she’d check the bottles on the IV stand and go to the closet for fresh pillows. She would lift him with one hand—she was small, but her arms were strong—and replace his old pillows with the new ones. That might actually have been an orderly’s job, but Brady had an idea that MacDonald was at the bottom of the hospital pecking order. Low nurse on the totem pole, so to speak.

He had decided he would open his eyes and speak to her just as she finished changing the pillows, when their faces were closest. It would scare her, and Brady liked to scare people. Much in his life had changed, but not that. Maybe she would even scream, as one nurse had when he made his coverlet do its rippling thing.

Only MacDonald diverted to the window on her way to the closet. There was nothing out there to see but the parking garage, yet she stood there for a minute . . . then two . . . then three. Why? What was so fascinating about a brick fucking wall?

Only it wasn’t all brick, Brady realized as he looked out with her. There were long open spaces on each level, and as the cars went up the ramp, the sun flashed briefly on their windshields.

Flash. And flash. And flash.

Jesus Christ, Brady thought. I’m the one who’s supposed to be in a coma, aren’t I? It’s like she’s having some kind of seiz—

But wait. Wait just a goddam minute.

Looking out with her? How can I be looking out with her when I’m lying here in bed?

There went a rusty pickup truck. Behind it came a Jaguar sedan, probably some rich doctor’s car, and Brady realized he wasn’t looking out with her, he was looking out from her. It was like watching the scenery from the passenger side while someone else drove the car.

And yes, Sadie MacDonald was having a seizure, one so mild she probably didn’t even know it was happening. The lights had caused it. The lights on the windshields of the passing cars. As soon as there was a lull in the traffic on that ramp, or as soon as the angle of the sunlight changed a bit, she would come out of it and go about her duties. She would come out of it without even knowing she’d been in it.

Brady knew this.

He knew because he was inside her.

He went a little deeper and realized he could see her thoughts. It was amazing. He could actually watch them flashing back and forth, hither and thither, high and low, sometimes crossing paths in a dark green medium that was—perhaps, he’d have to think about this, and very carefully to be sure—her core consciousness. Her basic Sadie-ness. He tried to go deeper, to identify some of the thoughtfish, although Christ, they went by so fast! Still . . .

Something about the muffins she had at home in her apartment.

Something about a cat she had seen in a pet shop window: black with a cunning white bib.

Something about . . . rocks? Was it rocks?

Something about her father, and that fish was red, the color of anger. Or shame. Or both.

As she turned from the window and headed for the closet, Brady felt a moment of tumbling vertigo. It passed, and he was back inside himself, looking out through his own eyes. She had ejected him without even knowing he was there.

When she lifted him to put two foam pillows with freshly laundered cases behind his head, Brady let his eyes remain in their fixed and half-lidded stare. He did not speak, after all.

He really did need to think about this.

• • •

During the next four days, Brady tried several times to get inside the heads of those who visited his room. He had a degree of success only once, with a young orderly who came in to mop the floor. The kid wasn’t a Mongolian idiot (his mother’s term for those with Down syndrome), but he wasn’t a Mensa candidate, either. He was looking down at the wet stripes his mop left on the linoleum, watching the brightness of each one fade, and that opened him up just enough. Brady’s visit was brief and uninteresting. The kid was wondering if they would have tacos in the caff that evening—big deal.

Then the vertigo, the sense of tumbling. The kid had spit him out like a watermelon seed, never once slowing the pendulum swings of his mop.

With the others who poked into his room from time to time, he had no success at all, and this failure was a lot more frustrating than being unable to scratch his face when it itched. Brady had taken an inventory of himself, and what he had found was dismaying. His constantly aching head sat on top of a skeletal body. He could move, he wasn’t paralyzed, but his muscles had atrophied and even sliding a leg two or three inches one way or another took a herculean effort. Being inside Nurse MacDonald, on the other hand, had been like riding on a magic carpet.

But he’d only gotten in because MacDonald had some form of epilepsy. Not much, just enough to briefly open a door. Others seemed to have natural defenses. He hadn’t even managed to stay inside the orderly for more than a few seconds, and if that ass-munch had been a dwarf, he would have been named Dopey.

Which made him remember a joke. Stranger in New York City asks a beatnik, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Beatnik replies, “Practice, man, practice.”

That’s what I need to do, Brady thought. Practice and get stronger. Because Kermit William Hodges is out there someplace, and the old Det.-Ret. thinks he won. I can’t allow that. I won’t allow that.

And so on that rain-soaked evening in mid-November of 2011, Brady opened his eyes, said his head hurt, and asked for his mother. There was no scream. It was Sadie MacDonald’s night off, and Norma Wilmer, the nurse on duty, was made of tougher stuff. Nevertheless, she gave a little cry of surprise, and ran to see if Dr. Babineau was still in the doctors’ lounge.

Brady thought, Now the rest of my life begins.

Brady thought, Practice, man, practice.